Two updates today: 1) On Point. I spoke today with Tom Ashbrook of WBUR and his On Point audience, about my contention (in the current cover story) that even in this time of wage…
Most people in the U.S. believe their country is going to hell. But they’re wrong. What a three-year journey by single-engine plane reveals about reinvention and renewal.
Over the past few years we’ve mentioned many of the positive developments underway in the three counties of northern Mississippi (Lowndes, Clay, and Oktibbeha) collectively known as the “Golden Triangle.”…
Brand-new companies play a surprisingly important part in progress toward fuller employment. A new report says that the prospects for start-ups may be improving.
This morning I was on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on CNN, talking about the project behind my current Atlantic cover story. A YouTube version of the full show is here; a one-minute out-take, in which…
The end of my current story in the magazine, on “How America Is Putting Itself Back Together,” explores the contrast between what I’m describing as healthy civic society at the…
Mississippi schools come in #49 in many national rankings. Read these essays and poems by high school students from Columbus, Mississippi. Then tell the folks who make up the rankings that they need a different algorithm.
The Chautauqua Institution is one of America’s great centers for civil, cultural, and intellectual engagement. A talk about 21st-century American renewal, at a place whose history traces to a great 19th-century reform movement.
Most people associate libraries with fustiness, quiet, and a previous era in technology. But across the country, they're embracing new technology to fill important new civic roles.